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Stories   >   Although it's a studio recording, Lisa Batiashvili's 'Secret Love Letters' conveys a sense of living exultantly in the moment / theStrad

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Although it's a studio recording, Lisa Batiashvili's 'Secret Love Letters' conveys a sense of living exultantly in the moment / theStrad

Posted: August 17, 2022

“What would human life be like,” asks Lisa Batiashvili, “without this range of emotions and feelings which we feel cannot be shared with anyone'” Her new album celebrates the fine art of concealment, of holding private passions just beneath the surface until they erupt. Secret Love Letters, set for release by Deutsche Grammophon on 19 August 2022, sees the Georgian-born German violinist explore some of the most romantic music ever written. In this, her first recording with a US orchestra, she is joined by The Philadelphia Orchestra and its inspirational Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin – with whom she has performed live many times – as well as by young Georgian pianist Giorgi Gigashvili. Together they embark on a journey that spans everything from forbidden love to romance seen from the perspective of old age.

“There are so many hidden messages in music, things that cannot be put into words,” notes Lisa. “Something very obvious unites the four pieces I’ve chosen for the album, by Chausson, Debussy, Franck and Szymanowski. It’s the message of love that is there in the music, in many different facets and colours, and so much of that message is secret and intimate.” Her long-time collaborator Nézet-Séguin is on the same wavelength: “One of my favorite quotes in life is that music starts where words stop. What’s so special about music is that it allows us to say things that sometimes we can’t even express to ourselves.”

At the heart of Secret Love Letters is Karol Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto, the Polish composer’s dream-like meditation on the imagery of Noc majowa (“May Night”), a poem by Tadeusz Micinski and the starting point for the creation of a score bursting with passion and sensuality. The composition was written in Ukraine during the First World War and first performed in Warsaw in November 1922. “It’s a piece full of love and pain deriving from the restrictions experienced by a man who was in love with another man at a time when this was outlawed both legally and morally”, Lisa explains. “It’s a dance between eroticism and compassion, between a dream world and tough reality.” Paul Kochanski, for whom the work was written, gave its US premiere with The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1924 at the historic Academy of Music in Philadelphia, the venue at which Lisa’s performance was recorded almost a century later.

Accompanying Lisa on piano in her final choice of music for Secret Love Letters is none other than Yannick Nézet-Séguin himself. Debussy’s Beau soir was originally conceived as a song, to lyrics by the novelist and critic Paul Bourget, and its exquisite depiction of an idyllic sunset inspired legendary violinist Jascha Heifetz to make a sultry arrangement for violin and piano. “Debussy was a messenger of the most magical atmosphere, fantasy and purity one can only imagine,” observes Batiashvili.

The Strad's JULIAN HAYLOCK writes…..The title of Lisa Batiashvili’s latest release may appear initially to have no connection with Franck’s Violin Sonata (with which she opens), until you recall it was written as a wedding gift for the dedicatee Eugène Ysaÿe. As is often the case with late Romantic violin sonatas, it has a dazzling piano part that goes way beyond the violin’s in terms of technical difficulty and Batiashvili is fortunate to have Giorgi Gigashvili at the keyboard: he ensures that Franck’s subtle rhythmic and harmonic inflections emerge with clarity from the middle register. Theirs is a high-octane reading, with the two players conveying the sensuality of the first and third movements, and revelling in the sonata’s virtuoso exuberance, not least in their thrilling acceleration to the final double-bar.

Again, Batiashvili could hardly wish for more attentive musical partners in Szymanowski’s First Concerto and Chausson’s Poème than the Philadelphians on ravishing form under Yannick Nézet-Séguin (who, as pianist, joins her for Debussy’s Beau soir). If the modern tendency is to exaggerate dynamic range (particularly at the lower end of the spectrum), Batiashvili here sounds temperamentally closer to, say, Rabin, Stern or Perlman, as she soars freely aloft without the slightest hint of inhibition. The DG engineers have captured her in beautifully detailed sound. These may be studio recordings, but they convey a sense of living exultantly in the moment.

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